In the competitive world of electronics, companies are continually taken to task to ensure that the products they sell are of the utmost reliability and quality. A company must test its products to determine the quality of the product at any point in the design and manufacture process.
In the field of microelectronics, for example, such testing requires more advanced techniques to ensure the viability of high-speed microelectronics circuits and devices. More recent semiconductor designs involve circuits and devices that can only truly be quality tested using mixed signals that are both analog and digital in nature. Test equipment manufacturers have responded to this application with the arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). The AWG provides manufacturers with the flexibility to define and generate test waveforms with almost infinitely variable signal characteristics, and have become an indispensable design and test tool in the engineer's kit.
The AWG offers a degree of versatility that few other instruments can match. In addition to creating standard waveforms, they can generate “real world” signals with all the glitches, drift, noise and other anomalies that a device-under-test (DUT) or circuit-under-test (CUT) will encounter when it leaves the lab or manufacturing floor. With the capability to produce a wide variety of waveforms, mixed signal sources embrace applications to microelectronic testing.
In some cases the existing performance flexibility of the AWG is not sufficient. For example, it is not likely that the engineer can find a specification that explicitly defines the capability to generate a waveform suitable for a specific semiconductor circuit or device, given that such circuits and devices are evolving at a rapid pace in laboratories. In general, an AWG's ability to generate a specific signal must be demonstrated by example.
What is needed is an improved testing system that at least includes the capability to modify a waveform applied to a DUT/CUT during the testing process.